The assignee of the present invention manufactures and deploys spacecraft for, inter alia, communications, scientific exploration, earth observation, transportation or habitation, and broadcast services. Market demands for such spacecraft have imposed increasingly stringent requirements on spacecraft payload capacity. To meet these demands, spacecraft with reflectors having an increased aperture size are desirable.
Launch vehicle compatibility is a second requirement faced by a spacecraft designer. The increased performance requirements are only advantageously met if compatibility with conventional, commercially available launch vehicles is maintained. Accordingly, a spacecraft, as configured for launch, is desirably made compatible with fairing envelope constraints of such launch vehicles as, for example, Ariane V, Atlas XEPF, Proton, Falcon 9, and Sea Launch. As a result, it is very often a requirement to reconfigure a spacecraft from a launch configuration to an on-orbit configuration. Some techniques related to this requirement are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,644,322, 6,448,940, 8,789,796 and 8,448,902, assigned to the assignee of the present disclosure, and in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 14/642,486 and 15/160,258, assigned to the assignee of the present disclosure, the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference into the present disclosure in their entirety for all purposes.
In the absence of the presently disclosed techniques, reflector aperture size is substantially limited by launch vehicle fairing dimensions. For example, the aperture diameter of a rigid reflector may not, generally, exceed an inner diameter of the launch vehicle fairing. Even for an unfurlable reflector, the aperture diameter of the reflector in the on-orbit configuration may still be limited by the height of the fairing. Moreover, such unfurlable reflectors are often optically inferior to rigid reflectors.
Thus, improved techniques for enabling a spacecraft, in the on orbit configuration, to have one or more very large aperture reflectors are desirable.